


Cat Clint

by mariana_oconnor



Series: Tumblr fic [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Animal Transformation, Cat!Clint, Fluff, M/M, Misunderstandings, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Possessive Clint Barton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 07:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13806684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariana_oconnor/pseuds/mariana_oconnor
Summary: Clint has been turned into a cat. It's a bit awkward, because Bucky was planning on asking him out to dinner.





	Cat Clint

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago, I asked for ridiculous tropey prompts on the WinterHawk Discord server. Someone - I can’t remember who - requested the pair of them turned into cats. This is… not quite that fic. But Clint as a cat. Utterly pointless, tropey fluffy nonsense get-together fic.

The cat has a fawn coat, with white across its belly and it’s right on top of the door.

There is no logical way a cat that size should have been able to climb up that door. There are no cupboards in the vicinity, no obvious climbing or jumping off points.

“If he eats a bird, is that cannibalism?” Stark asks idly. Bucky takes a second to analyse the question and then blinks because that really didn’t make any sense, even for Stark. Apparently he’s walked into something. All of the Avengers are crowded round the doorway the cat is sitting on. It glares down at them, and they stare up at it. Steve looks perplexed and worried, his face screwed up to the side, like the cat is a personal problem for him. Wilson and Stark look amused, Wanda is clearly trying to look comforting and safe, reaching out to coax the cat down. But it’s Natasha who catches Bucky’s eye. She looks concerned. Not like Steve does, because she never shows anything that much, even surrounded by friends, but if you know how to read her…

That’s odd, and a little worrying.

Bucky opens his mouth to speak and that’s when the cat catches sight of him.

They stare at each other for a moment, then the cat makes a weird chirping sound and leaps.

There is the sound of a collective intake of breath as it bounds off the door. Its paws hit Steve’s shoulder and it bounds again, leaping to the floor with a grace that is ruined as soon as its feet hit the tiled surface.

Its eyes widen in alarm as its feet slide every which way, hurtling towards Bucky’s feet.

After a few seconds of flailing, it finally gets itself under control again and twitches one ear, before walking more sedately up to Bucky, as though nothing had just happened.

“Don’t let him get away!” Tony shouts and Bucky doesn’t think, just reaches down to scoop the cat up, but it jumps into his hands anyway, scrambling up his arm to his shoulder, where it perches again, tail swishing from side to side.

Bucky pulls his face back to look up at the cat, the cat looks down at him. It has blue eyes, which is odd for a cat, right? Don’t most of ‘em have green eyes?

“You’re a cat, not a parrot, bird brain,” Stark says. “Look, we have to get someone to look you over, make sure you’re no more scrambled than usual.”

The cat hisses again and Bucky’s mind catches up with what Stark just said.

“Bird brain?” he echoes, glancing at Stark before looking back at the cat. “Clint?”

The cat meows, piteously and slow blinks at him.

Right. Clint’s a cat.

Well, that’s gonna make his dinner invite a little awkward.

*

“Do you have catnip in your pocket?” Wilson asks, looking at where Clint is curled up in Bucky’s lap. Bucky just shrugs, because ever since he’d climbed onto Bucky’s shoulder earlier, Clint seems to have decided that Bucky is his own personal climbing frame, chair and cat bed in one.

It’s sort of nice. Clint’s got very soft fur like this, and his body’s like a radiator, but he can’t help thinking about how much he’d prefer running his fingers through Clint’s hair if he were human. He’d also feel a hell of a lot less like he was going to accidentally crush his skull. Cats are tiny.

Apparently Loki had been an asshole again, Clint hadn’t kept his mouth shut and one thing led to another, led to Clint being a cat. Bucky had got a bit lost in the middle somewhere, but Steve had sort of waved his hand and said ‘magic’, as though that explains everything. Which, unfortunately, it kind of does.

Wanda’s working on it, though, so that’s good. And for the time being, Clint and Bucky are watching Mission: Impossible films, with the subtitles turned on because human hearing aids aren’t made to fit cats, and Clint is literally purring in Bucky’s lap, and headbutting his hand every time he stops petting him.

It’s a little bit adorable, and a lot worrying.

Being deaf means that no one’s quite sure how much of Clint is still Clint and how much is now cat. His brain’s a lot smaller, so maybe he can’t fit as much in there. Bucky knows that Stark would probably say that there wasn’t a lot in there to begin with, but Bucky knows that’s not true. Clint’s got a sharp mind when he wants to show it off.

The fact that Bucky seems to be Clint’s favourite human is making him feel more than a little smug.

“Why not Natasha, though?” Wilson asks. “I mean… I would have thought he’d go to her, not you.”

“Clint knows that I appreciate cats precisely because they don’t demand my attention,” Natasha says. She leans over Bucky’s shoulder to run one finger over Clint’s head, and he grasps at it with his tiny paws.

Knowing it’s Clint, it really shouldn’t be as adorable as it is.

“He knows who’ll be easy to manipulate,” she says. Bucky frowns, and turns to her, but Wilson’s already laughing.

“You can say that again,” Wilson agrees. Bucky lifts his hand to give the guy the middle finger. Immediately Clint’s headbutting his hand again.

“You are a demanding little shit,” Bucky says.

“He’s just as bad as a human,” Natasha tells him. “Something to think about.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bucky says. Wilson just laughs again, but Bucky ignores him, because Clint’s purring again. Right up until Natasha starts walking out of the room, then he leaps up to run after her and curl around her feet.

“Fine,” she says, “you can come with me.”

Bucky’s lap feels very cold all of a sudden, and he’s not sure what to do with his hands.

“Missing your boyfriend already?” Wilson asks.

Oh yeah, that’s what he can do with his hands.

He puts both middle fingers up and glares. Wilson just rolls his eyes.

*

Clint insists on taking part in training. No matter how many times they put him out of the room he manages to make his way back in again, and it turns into ‘chase Clint’ rather than anything actually useful, although it is a bit sad when he stops in front of his quiver and paws at it mournfully. Steve assigns Bucky to the task of keeping Clint occupied elsewhere so that everyone else can train without being worried about stepping on him (Sam had stood on his tail once, and the wails were  _hideous_ ).

“Come on, Barton,” Bucky says, picking Clint up and tucking him into his arms. “I’ll see if we can find some Dog Cops to put on.”

“Hey, the sniper bros get to watch Dog Cops instead of training?” Stark asks. “That hardly seems fair.”

“You’re welcome to try Clint duty if you want,” Steve offers. Stark winces at the idea. So far the only times he’s been left in charge of cat!Clint a lot of things have broken.

Natasha is smirking at him like she knows something as Bucky heads for the door. He glares at her, before realising that her eyes are fixed on Clint, not him. He looks down at the cat, who immediately starts to wash himself in an attempt to look innocent.

Clint is definitely planning something.

But the day continues without incident. Clint disappears off on his own, sometimes into the vents, sometimes just around, but he pops back in to see Bucky regularly, kneading his paws into Bucky’s chest, or batting at his hair. It’s sort of nice, but Bucky wishes they could just have a conversation. Or shoot something together. He’s not looking for a pet.

*

He wakes in the middle of the night to something warm curled against his stomach. Bucky blinks wearily and isn’t surprised to look down and see Clint curled up there, big eyes looking back at him.

“Didn’t Stark buy you the most expensive cat bed on the market, or summat?” he asks, but of course Clint can’t hear him, just curls himself up further, tail caught between his paws, like he’s hugging it, and closes his eyes. Bucky sighs, and tries to ignore the weird tug in his stomach because Clint is in his bed.

Admittedly, he’s a cat, but it’s still  _progress_ , isn’t it?

*

It’s five days before Wanda feels confident enough in her abilities to turn Clint back into a human without exploding him. They don’t tell Bucky that until after she’s started, which is probably for the best, because he can live with Clint the cat if the alternative is Clint splattered on the walls in tiny pieces.

It’s five days of purring, and tiny claws digging into him, head-butts and stroking. It’s five days with a level of touching that would be weird in any other circumstance. But Clint’s a cat. Cats like being stroked, that’s all it is. Clint and he are friends and Clint’s tiny cat brain has locked onto that and decided that Bucky is his person in the way that cats do. It’s meaningless.

Bucky’s going to miss the warm weight of him curled up on his stomach.

Of course, Clint comes back stark naked, stretching, and doesn’t seem to realise that he’s not feline anymore until he tries to stretch in a way that the human body really doesn’t do. It’s still obscene, though, the length of his muscles and the undulating movement of them under his skin, the long line of his throat. Bucky staring at him greedily, like he’s been starved, or like Clint might disappear again if Bucky looks away.

Steve elbows him in the stomach, bringing him back to his senses as his eyes stray too far down.

Clint realises that something’s wrong and pauses, opening his eyes to blink at them. His gaze finds Bucky’s immediately and they stare at each other before Clint looks down to see his very human body.

“Oh thank fuck,” Clint says.

Bucky understands the sentiment, but it still feels a little like a stab to the gut, the fact that Clint’s clearly not sad at all that those five days are over and he doesn’t have to rely on Bucky to open doors for him anymore, and he won’t be curling up in Bucky’s bed anymore. Of course he’s happy, he has opposable thumbs again. Why wouldn’t he be happy?

“Put some clothes on, man,” Wilson says. “No one wants to see that.”

Steve mutters ‘Most of us, anyway’ under his breath and Bucky ignores him valiantly. He also ignores Natasha’s smile.

“Right, clothes,” Clint says, looking around. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any.”

Bucky turns and walks away, leaving everyone behind as the world tilts back to normal again.

It’s just been one of those weeks.

*

Bucky puts on the next Mission: Impossible film that night, though there’s no cat to watch it with, and Clint swings into the room half an hour in.

“Aw, you’re not watching without me…” he says, swinging himself over the back of the sofa and then collapsing to put his head in Bucky’s lap.

Bucky freezes and looks down.

“What are you doing, Barton?” he asks. Clint ignores him. “Clint?”

“Shh, this is the best bit,” Clint says. On the screen, someone is pulling their face off. Bucky wants to argue, but he can’t think of any way to do it. It’s not like they haven’t been doing this all week anyway. It’s only weird if he makes it weird.

It’s about quarter of an hour later that he realises that his hand is stroking through Clint’s hair. He’s on automatic. He’s just following the goddam muscle memory and he’s petting the man like he’s still a cat.

His hand pauses.

“Don’t stop, feels nice,” Clint says, so Bucky continues, eyes wide like a deer in the headlights.

This is definitely weird.

Nice, but weird.

Near the end of the film, he sees Steve standing in the doorway, laughing at him silently. Bucky glares at him in a way that he hopes conveys ‘mind your own business’ and ‘we are never talking about this’. Steve just shakes his head and mouths the word ‘hopeless’ at him.

He and Clint, before this whole, feline catastrophe, had been sort of maybe working towards something. There had been innuendo, flirting, a couple of casual touches that could have become not so casual touches. It had been a lazy sort of courtship, with both of them coming on it slowly, but Bucky had been working it out, he had been building up to actually asking the guy out. On a date. Like a romantic kind of a thing.

Now everything’s gone the wrong way up, and he feels like they jumped three steps forward without actually getting anywhere. It’s unnerving, and he wants to go back and try it again, and he wants to just see where all of this takes them. And he wants to press Clint up against the wall of his bedroom and fucking wreck him. The guy’s making these little contented sighs in his sleep (and he is asleep now), it’s ridiculous.

Bucky’s head is a bit of a mess right now.

Clint wakes up when the movie’s over and everything’s exploded and Tom Cruise has run several marathons and the day is well and truly saved, stretches again, which is a beautiful thing to see, more so in this body than it was in his cat shape. Bucky could watch him stretch for hours.

Not true, he’d probably be overcome by the urge to touch before a single minute had passed, but the sentiment stands.

“Bed time, then,” Clint says, yawning, before heading for the door.

He pauses in the doorway, to look back at Bucky, who’s having a little trouble getting certain parts of his anatomy under control again, parts that appreciated Clint’s stretching in a more active sort of a way.

Clint opens his mouth to say something and then frowns.

“G’night,” he mutters, and Bucky’s convinced that was not what he was going to say.

“Good night,” Bucky agrees.

*

Clint avoids him after that.

Bucky doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s the before, when they were friends, moving towards something more, the during, when Clint was a constant warm presence at his side, and now there’s the after.

It takes him two days to decide that they have to talk about this.

It’s a break from form for them. They haven’t talked about anything so far, and it had been easy, but now Clint’s just…

Bucky walks into a room and Clint starts looking for the exit.

He’s not going to grab him, not going to force him to have this conversation.

“Sorry, if I made you uncomfortable,” he grinds out before Clint disappears again. The man stops so suddenly it’s like watching a cartoon. His arms sort of flail and his head turns around, eyebrows up near his hairline and his eyes wide.

“You…” Clint says, expressively. “If you made  _me_  uncomfortable?” he asks. “Buh…”

“I’m fine with bein’ friends,” Bucky says. He forces himself to make eye contact.

“Wha’?” Clint’s mouth is shaping other words, words that he can’t seem to vocalise. “I… But I was the one making you uncomfortable… I mean… I’m not a cat anymore.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Hard not to,” Bucky agrees.

“And I was still…” Clint gestures with his hand in a way that isn’t as expressive as he thinks. “All over you,” he says eventually, when it’s clear Bucky isn’t getting it. “How was that you making me uncomfortable?” he asks. Bucky shifts uncomfortably, because apparently Clint hadn’t noticed that Bucky was enjoying the extra contact with human!Clint a bit too much, and that’s not something he really wants to explain. He swears this stuff was easier in the 40s.

“You started avoiding me.”

“So that I wouldn’t make  _you_  uncomfortable,” Clint says.

They stare at each other, and there’s a moment of dawning clarity before they both start laughing. It’s less because the situation’s funny and more the release of tension.

“So you weren’t uncomfortable?” Clint asks, still grinning.

“I kinda… like it when you’re all over me,” Bucky says, the words coming easier now. Clint’s grin turns wicked.

“Wanna get all over me?” Clint asks. It’s a terrible line, but the words are barely out of his mouth when Bucky’s crossing the room towards him.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

*

It’s later that night (earlier that morning) and Clint’s got his head stuck right into Bucky’s neck, biting and kissing and… sniffing?

“Do I need a shower or something?” Bucky asks, and Clint pulls back, his face fallen into a frown like a half-melted snowman.

“Nah it’s just… I sorta miss being a cat.”

“O…kay…” Bucky says, because it’s not just him, that’s a weird thing to say to someone when you’re naked in bed with them. “Pretty sure we wouldn’t be doing this if you were still a cat.”

“No, not that… that’s great.” Bucky rolls Clint onto his back and pins him there. He’s not liking the frown.

“What is it, then?” he asks.

Clint pouts.

“It’s just… when I was a cat. I could smell all this stuff, right?”

“Yeah, cats have good noses,” Bucky agrees. “You miss bein’ able to  _smell_  me?”

“Sort of… it’s more,” Clint sighs. “Look, there’s this thing, where when I rubbed up against you,” Bucky smirks. There’s been a whole lot more than rubbing just recently. Clint grins, clearly knowing where his mind’s gone. “When I was a cat, I mean. I’d rub up against you, and you’d smell like me. You’d smell like you were  _mine_.”

Bucky looks at him for a second and then shakes his head.

“So you’re a possessive kinda guy?” he asks.

“I guess I am,” Clint sounds surprised. “That gonna be a problem?”

“Only if you don’t mind it bein’ mutual.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at https://mariana-oconnor.tumblr.com/post/165016122897/catclint-fic


End file.
